The Truth About Apple's New MacBook Neo

[00:00] Today is the day that pigs learn to fly.  Apple released a budget laptop that appears   to be rather excellent on paper. This is  the blush MacBook Neo. It kind of looks   like the color of Santa's socks after he  does the laundry, or maybe it's a glass of  

[00:15] milk that's had a strawberry dipped in it.  Or how about an embarrassed marshmallow? Oh, I got it. It's the color of a flamingo that's  lacking sufficient shrimp in its diet. That's it.  

[00:30] From now on, we'll call it "famished flamingo."  You would think that for being only 500 bucks,   Apple would want to make their logo a bit  bigger to help offset the lost revenue with   increased advertising, but we'll get into  the nitty-gritty later. Inside the box,  

[00:45] we have a new 20-watt charger and a  USB-C cable. And you might be like,   "Hey, Jerry, why would they include a  smartphone charger inside a laptop box?" And that's a fantastic question. See,  it turns out that this MacBook Neo is,  

[00:58] in fact, a smartphone with a laptop keyboard,  laptop screen, and a laptop battery. The Neo is   using an A18 Pro chip, which is the exact  same processor that we find in the iPhone  

[01:10] 16 Pro Max that just happens to be sitting on my  desk up in the corner. And here, let's prove it. If we flip over the Famished Flamingo  MacBook Neo and grab my screwdriver,   we can start removing all the pentalobe screws on  the back panel. There are eight of them. And it's  

[01:26] important to keep them all organized since each  of the screws has a different shoulder lengths,   the back panel and pull it off to the  side. It has cool little hooks embedded  

[01:39] into the metal that allow it to slide up  and off, but then can get pressed straight   back down again when we go to reassemble  it later—assuming it survives that long. And there we go. We have the antennas up top,  like the Bluetooth 6 and Wi-Fi 6. Then the long,  

[01:53] thin motherboard, a massive battery here in  the center, and the lower clicky trackpad and   dual stereo loudspeakers near the bottom.  You'll notice that the MacBook Neo has the   same shape of motherboard that we find  inside of the M4 iPad. But of course,  

[02:06] instead of the M4 computer chip running a  laptop operating system, we have an iPhone   chip running the entire laptop. And we'll  compare the two a bit closer in a second. But it is wild to see that there is no heatsink  or heat pipes to help cool off anything in here.  

[02:21] Not even a fan, which I'm not a huge fan of. I  guess we'll turn it off before we go too much   farther. I'll remove two more pentalobe screws  near the battery, unplug it like a little Lego,   and then take out a whopping 18 more screws.  I'll unplug the two stereo loudspeaker wires  

[02:36] so the entire battery can come free. This  might be the fastest Apple laptop battery   removal of all time. Theres no pull tabs,  just screws. And I'd bet that anyone who   knows how to work a screwdriver could swap  out this battery in about 5 or 10 minutes,  

[02:50] which is actually wild—especially if you  know what Apple used to be giving us inside   their laptops, like this monstrosity  of a battery inside the MacBook Pro. What the heck? It feels like Apple is turning  over a new leaf this year, especially since  

[03:03] the Neo's battery is made with 95% recycled  lithium and 100% recycled cobalt—all 36.5 Watt   of it. That's a pretty big deal. Apple’s  taken a page out of Framework's playbook,  

[03:15] and I'm totally fine with that. We'll get  back to the processor in just a second,   but first, continuing on with our teardown,  we'll remove the clicky trackpad next. It's really interesting here that Apple has added  a very substantial metal bracket to the back  

[03:28] side of the trackpad. Humans naturally think  that heavier items should be more expensive.   And while this bracket does double as rigid  support for the back side of the clicky trackpad,  

[03:41] I'm sure Apple didn't go out of their way  to reduce the weight all that much either.   And for those curious, it does resonate around a  C-sharp. Lifting the trackpad out of the laptop,   we can see it has two parallel plates that  provide the spring-back force to level the  

[03:55] trackpad out after it's been compressed.  And the physical clicky button on the   back is what presses up against the thick  metal plate we took out a few seconds ago. The dual loudspeakers come out next. These  are big old blocks of side-firing spatial  

[04:08] audio stereo speakers, and they are glued  shut pretty well. I thought we would need   to get all catastrophic with them, but then I  remembered we have magnet paper and teardown   skins. And these MacBook Neo magnets are  really as small as they look. Basically  

[04:21] the same size as an earpiece from the Samsung  Galaxy S26 Ultra or even the iPhone 16 Pro Max,   which we'll get to more in a second. There are  smartphone parts all over the place in here. With both speakers out, we can remove the  color-matched headphone jack. Also pink,  

[04:37] but with plausible deniability. To remove  the antenna board, we have five more screws,   including the wire attachment points on  the motherboard. And then we can work on   the motherboard herself. There are two  display ribbon cable connectors. These  

[04:50] have metal locking latches that flip up so the  connector can slip out. Then the motherboard has   five screws of its own, plus the two USB-C  ports using a single screwed-in Lego-style   connector on the right-hand side. Three more  ZIF connectors with little plastic latches are  

[05:05] in the center. And I assume these are for  the power button, trackpad, and keyboard. Finally, the motherboard is released. This, my  friends, is the entire brains of the MacBook Neo.   It's the smartphone running the whole computer.  And I don't say that condescendingly at all.  

[05:19] According to the benchmarks, this laptop can hold  its own for all the basics and work great for the   vast majority of the human population, except  for—oh no, what is this? What have they done?  

[05:31] I can't believe Apple installed the processor logo  upside down. Inconceivable. Even from the keyboard   side of your Neo resting on your lap, the Apple  stem on the A18 Pro will be pointing towards you,  

[05:44] not away from you. I bet they thought nobody  would notice, but here we are noticing. Speaking of noticing, let's grab the motherboard  out of the iPhone 16 Pro Max. You can already   tell that the iPhone motherboard is quite a bit  smaller than what we see inside the MacBook Neo,  

[05:59] but it should still have the same  processing chip. A phone board can't   be spread out like a laptop or an iPad  board can. There's less real estate,   so it has to be folded over and stacked on  top of itself. If I take my razor knife,  

[06:13] I can pop open the two halves. And then we  can see, indeed, that the Neo and the iPhone   16 Pro Max have the same chip. The chip in the  iPhone doesn't have an Apple logo on it, though,   which is surprising. Apple normally tries to  slap that logo everywhere it can, but it does  

[06:28] still look super cool, though, so thumbs up  for getting to see both chips side by side. There are a few things left inside the laptop  that we need to check out, like the four screws   holding in the dual USB-C ports. The one closer  to the back side of the laptop is USB 3.0,  

[06:42] and the one closer to the user is USB 2.0,  but both can be used to charge up the battery.   Then we have the large metallic sticker  over the back side of the Magic Keyboard,   and this helps keep any gunk or dust from  getting inside of the MacBook components.

[06:56] the laptop is completely disassembled.  Not bad for 500 bucks. Rather amazing,   actually. Apple says one of the ways they  managed to decrease costs is by using a  

[07:08] metal-forming process instead of a machining  process. They take 90% recycled aluminum and   mold out the inner and upper housings in such  a precise way that hardly anything needs to be   milled down after the fact to reach that  final tolerance. You can see some minor  

[07:23] milling around the trackpad cutout, but reducing  machine times helps reduce cost by quite a bit. machine markings everywhere. And if Apple had to  machine every MacBook Neo frame this extensively,  

[07:38] well, let's just say it wouldn't be 500  bucks anymore. And I'm glad Apple found   I put it back together. But there's  only one way to find out for sure. I think Apple's really onto something here. An  easy-to-repair, dedicated email, web browsing,  

[07:54] and typing machine is going to sell super well,  especially in the education space. When I was a   kid in school, our whole computer lab was made  up of the translucent Apple desktop computers.   share from the Chromebooks, which currently  dominate the school space. Chromebooks also  

[08:12] sometimes have mobile processors inside,  like the Qualcomms. You might be like,   they're probably just trying to trap kids  into their ecosystem at a younger age.

[08:25] But hey, it looks like everything is working.  Speaking of which, though, if Apple isn't going   to make the logo any bigger, we'll just have  to make the Apple logo better, 1984 style.   My channel sponsor, dbrand, has a new series  of skins that perfectly hide the scratches I  

[08:40] made earlier. Apple actually used a super colorful  logo in 1984 to bring awareness to their recently   introduced color displays. And now all MacBooks  can look ultra-friendly on retro midnight, silver,  

[08:53] classic, and space black. Each 1984 skin is  perfectly matched to their modern MacBook   counterpart. Steve Jobs wanted the colorful  logo to be more friendly. As everyone knows,   Apples always last longer with a skin. Get  some protection for your computer today with  

[09:09] the link in the description. And thanks  a ton for watching. I'll see you around.